with a pen inherited from a goose and Homer

Jan. 7th, 2017

Jan. 7th, 2017

Last night, as we channel-surfed, we happened across the pilot for Emerald City, an "edgy" take on The Wizard of Oz. This is a hilarious pitch in and of itself, because The Wizard of Oz has had so many edgy adaptions in the last century; everyone and their brother finds Oz to be creepy and weird, and everyone wants to play up that element in adapting it. (The much more subversive take would be to emphasize its bubbly insanity in the vein of Adventure Time.) In this case, the specific approach is The Wizard of Oz meets Game of Thrones, a fusion that nobody was asking for. The plot is standard reflexive grimdark, but the visuals from Tarsem Singh are pretty (although he does better in big open vistas than smaller sets), and also Dorothy encounters the ruggedly handsome Scarecrow when he's literally crucified outside a burning town. Afterwards, he's an amnesiac with PTSD and prone to fits of manic violence, and that trope is, alas, pretty squarely in my wheelhouse.

At one point, Dorothy is trying to teach joke-structure to the Scarecrow through knock-knock jokes, and it's the clumsiest set-up ever for the moment, post-manic-violence, when the Scarecrow attempts to reconnect with Dorothy via knock-knock jokes. "Knock knock," he hisses as he stumbles after her. "Knock knock." Dorothy, haunted, does not look back and does not answer.

And it's totally dumb, and I ate it up with a spoon.

I watched the pilot with my mother, who snorted at every new absurdity and kept asking, "Is HE the cowardly lion???" I'm unfamiliar with the Baum books, so the Ozma plot-twist did surprise me, although I had assumed that something along those lines was coming, given the apparent disjunction between performer and role. (Reviewers who have, I think, seen screeners of the future episodes suggest that the show is not going to be amazing about identity issues, so I'm suitably braced.)